1. Area of the Art
This invention relates to methods of delivery of advertisements and measuring responses to those delivered advertisements and in particular relates to the targeting of advertisements delivered over networks such as the Internet.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In advertising, it is considered highly desirable to target advertisements to the appropriate potential customer base, rather than to broadcast advertisements in general. It has long been known that, for example, advertisements for computers should generally not appear in magazines on gardening and, conversely, advertisements for gardening tools should not appear in magazines on computers. Similarly, advertisers have generally targeted their advertisements on television to programs appropriate for the desired customer base.
It has also long been known that an advertisement that is repeated too often will eventually become ignored by consumers. Therefore, an advertiser typically wishes to eliminate duplication and reach as many individuals in the advertiser's target group as possible.
The recent development of on-line networks, such as America On-Line, Compuserve, and the Internet, has led to "on-line" advertising. For example, on the Internet, often such on-line advertisements will appear on a web page, such as a banner on the top or the bottom of the page. When the user views a web page using a browser such as Internet Explorer 3 or Netscape 3, the banner appears at the appropriate location and the user may then try to find out more information regarding the advertisement by selecting the advertisement (clicking through on that banner) through the use of the mouse or other pointing device. This will cause a HTTP message to be generated by the browser using the information encapsulated in association with the banner to send a request for an object with a given URL address to a different appropriate web site to access, for example, the advertiser's home page.
Nonetheless, such advertising has had, so far, a poor rate of response because it is untargeted advertising. Thus, someone who is totally uninterested in computers other than they happen to be on the Internet, may continually see advertisements for computers. On the other hand, someone who is interested in computers may continually see advertisements for gardening tools when browsing through a particular web site. Thus it would be highly desirable to have a method of targeting the advertising to the appropriate user.
In addition, if a user of such computer networks is continuously exposed to the same advertisement, the response rate to the advertisement will generally decline. Therefore, it is highly desirable to have a system that controls the frequency of exposure of advertisements to particular users. In addition, it is also important for the advertisers to track response to the advertisements and to acquire as much information about those people responding to the advertisements for targeting those same people at later dates.
Therefore, it is a first object of this invention to provide targeting of advertising over networks such as the Internet. It is a second object of this invention to provide control over frequency of exposure to users for advertisements appearing on web pages over time. It is a third object of the invention to provide the capability to gather information about recipients of the advertisement.